There are certain moments in life when one is faced with making crucial decisions.All one can do in these situations is to trust one's instincts, stand firm and draw a line in the sand.

I'm in the Ardèche for a holiday with family and assorted friends. I haven't worn shoes for 10 days and am growing a beard that is turning out to be unnervingly grey. All is good … well almost all.

It’s been the final week of filming for Fool Britannia (part deux) and I can’t remember having had a stranger one for a long time.

I am a curious smoker. By this I mean I only smoke when other people are smoking … and offering. I can't remember the last time I bought a packet of cigarettes, but I know that the pack of 20 cost less than two quid. I gather that they are now considerably more expensive – by the sighs and groan from my television crew whenever I ponce one off them. It's the boredom that makes me smoke. Filming a television show is very much like being in a far-less-glamorous version of the Rolling Stones – "24 years of hanging around and one year of actual playing", as Charlie Watts so elegantly put it.

We now hide behind our phones so that we aren't obliged to greet people, look at waiters or treat anybody like a human being

I've lied so often about having been to Glastonbury that I honestly can't remember whether I've actually been or not. I'm pretty sure that I haven't. The very concept of the place fills me with fear and loathing. The idea of joining a mass traffic jam to Somerset in the English summer to live in an enormous hippy refugee camp surrounded by people trying hard to be "alternative" is not one that appeals. When I visited a real refugee camp on the Syrian-Jordanian border this year I remember wondering what on earth the poor inhabitants would make of photographs of Worthy Farm in full flow? "You mean those people are there voluntarily? But the mud, the squalor, the terrible clothes …."

We organised a bushcraft party for my son last week. This involved him and five friends going feral and wandering off to camp overnight in the woods behind our farm. The two bushcrafters overseeing the party were going to teach them to make traps, start fires and skin and cook a deer. This they did, and, judging by their demeanours when I picked them up next morning, they'd had a fabulous time.

Our home zoo has expanded once again with the arrival last week of our new Labrador puppy, Fitzgerald. For the past 10 years we have been truly blessed with the existence of Huxley, a black Labrador and close personal friend of quite exceptional intelligence. Now, as Huxley approaches retirement age, we decided as a family that he should have the opportunity of passing on his considerable wisdom to the next generation – hence Fitzgerald.

A big day in my life is nigh. I'm taking my nine-year-old son to his first proper cricket match. We are going to see England vs Australia, but I'll be lucky if it's as good as the first one my dad took me to.